The short answer is it isn’t what you think. Likely, your pelvic floor is not weak. It’s probably too tight, and doing more kegels is making it worse.
We are doing something at Cobra Command in Basehor this month that we have never done before. It’s called FLOOR WORK, it runs two Sundays, and it exists because I got tired of watching strong women leak when jumping rope and resigning to “this is just their life now” or, “this is what happens after you have kids”.
So let’s talk about the one big thing nobody wants to talk about in the gym.
First, how common is this actually
Way more common than the silence around it suggests.
Somewhere around one in three women who have had a baby deal with some version of this. Plenty of women who have never been pregnant deal with it too. And in a gym setting it shows up in very specific places… double unders, box jumps, heavy squats, running, a hard sneeze at the bottom of a clean.
Here is what I see happen, almost every time. She stops doing double unders. Then she scales the box jumps. Then she picks the workout with no running or just bikes every time. Within a few months she has quietly built a whole training life around avoiding leakage, and nobody at the gym knows why. She becomes embarassed and ashamed… and it sucks… because it is completely fixable.
Why kegels are usually the wrong answer
Everybody’s first instinct is kegels, because that’s the only advice anyone ever gets.
A kegel is a contraction. You squeeze. And if your pelvic floor were genuinely weak, squeezing would be a reasonable place to start.
But a lot of the women I see are walking around with a pelvic floor that is already gripping all day long. Tight is not the same as strong. A muscle that never lets go is a muscle that can’t produce force when you actually need it, in the same way that a bicep you hold flexed all day is not a bicep you can lift with.
So she does more kegels, adds more tension to a system that is already clenched, and gets more symptoms. Then she decides her body is broken.
Your body is not broken. You were handed one tool and it was the wrong one.
What your pelvic floor is actually doing under load
This is my favorite part to explain, because once you see it, you stop thinking about the pelvic floor as its own separate little thing.
Your pelvic floor is the bottom of a canister. Your diaphragm is the top. Your deep abs and your low back make up the walls. When you brace to lift something heavy, all four of those work together to manage the pressure inside.
Jump, and that pressure spikes hard and fast. If the floor of the canister can’t meet that spike, the pressure has to go somewhere, and it pushes down and out.
Which means the fix is almost never “squeeze harder.” The fix is timing, breath, and teaching that whole canister to work together again. Contract when you need to, and just as importantly, release when you don’t.
That’s what the two sessions are actually about.
Session 1: Know Your Floor
Sunday, September 20, 9am to 11am.
Contract and release. You’ll learn what your pelvic floor actually does, how to feel it, how to get it to let go, and how to coordinate it with your breath. Most women have never been taught to find this at all, let alone relax it on purpose.
This is the foundation. If you only do one, do this one.
Session 2: Under Load
Sunday, October 4, 9am to 12pm.
This is where we take it into the gym. Lifting and jumping, symptom free. How to brace for a heavy squat without bearing down, what to do with your breath on a max effort, and how to get back to jump rope and box jumps without bracing for what might happen.
Session 1 teaches you the system. Session 2 puts it under load.
Who this is for
Women who leak, and women who don’t.
If you’re currently working around something, this is obvious. But this is also for the woman who has never had a symptom in her life and would like to keep it that way, and for anyone heading into perimenopause, when tissue changes make this a whole lot more relevant than it was at 30.
You don’t need to be a CrossFitter. You don’t need to be a member here. You don’t need to have had kids.
Ready to stop working around it?
FLOOR WORK is $75 for a single session, or $120 for both, which saves you $30.
Sunday, September 20 from 9am to 11am, and Sunday, October 4 from 9am to 12pm, at Cobra Command in Basehor.
You can sign up and pay online right here:
Session 1 only, Sept 20 – $75
Session 2 only, Oct 4 – $75
BOTH sessions – $120, saves you $30
Space is limited, and Session 1 is this Sunday.
And if you have been quietly scaling things for months without telling anybody why, I promise you are not the only person in the room who has.
-Jill
